I'm 40,000 words into Cog now and I'm in the midst of the big middle story events. Fun.
This is my current description of the project:
Cog is the first girl to become an apprentice to ‘Mack’ the Queen’s Master Engineer. Only nobody knows Cog is actually a girl, or that she really wasn’t supposed to be an apprentice at all. Keeping herself a secret from Mack, her roommate, and everyone else in the Steel Tower is only the beginning of her troubles. When items and gizmos start to go missing, it looks like one of her best friends will take the blame. While trying to help him, she discovers a much darker plot that threatens to throw the whole kingdom into war. Fixing kingdoms might not be the same as fixing an automechanical potion mixer, but Cog has a set of precision screwdrivers and isn’t afraid to use them.
Make of this what you will, Gud, but my first thought on reading that was "Oh, 'Yentl'!"
I don't know what to make of it, I've heard of the movie, but I don't know a thing about it.
Barbra Streisand plays a girl in 19th Century (?) Europe who pretends to be a boy so she can go to a Torah school so she can continue the studies she did with her father, when, as a girl, she's forbidden to study Torah. She falls in love with a guy but has a girl fall in love with her, and I believe the relationship proceeds at least to a betrothal. I don't remember how it ends.
It proceeds to marriage. Yentl has to keep making excuses not to have sex. The girl Yentl marries finally demands sex. (The actress playing Yentl's wife went on to marry Spielberg I think. Radiantly beautiful.) Umm - I liked Yentl, though it has been a long time since I saw it. But then again, I have a Barbra Streisand fetish.
Oh and the end. Yentl reveals that she is a girl. A boy who was having feelings for Yentl is relieved to find out she is not a boy. Yentl heads off for 19th century America, where no doubt she will find a feminist paradise. I forget if the boy marries Yentl's wife or not.
Um... yeah. It's not much like that. There's much less Torah and much more mad science and trolls.
Well, my agent thought it was a little too much of a good thing and that turning CH 1 into CH 5 introduces the primary incident in that chapter a little too late in the narrative. I see her point even though it means a trip back to the drawing board. I do have a bit of a grace period, however, seeing as she's at the London Book Fair until Wednesday.
::sigh::
I really thought I'd nailed it-- adrenaline rush, I suppose.
Well the nice thing about revising manuscripts in the electronic age, is if you don't like the revision, the old version is right there there to try again with. As someone who started out with typewriters, I still appreciate the invention of word processing, even after all these decades. (Part of it is that I have a minor disability that makes writing legibly extremely hard work, so I learned to touch type at 11. Which now that I think of it, most people probably won't see why that was a big deal because kids now learn to keyboard at the same age they learn to read. Or before. I just made myself feel really old.)
I learned to type on my father's manual Smith Corona. My college manual typewriter is in my storage shed. I may need to arrange to be buried with it.
